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Video marketing is a great opportunity to market your business that uses the web as a platform for promoting your brand through an integration of components that demands your audience’s attention.
From all of the statistics that can be found about video marketing, it proves to be more entertaining to your target audience which means it creates a steady flow of traffic and more clients watching your videos while increasing your popularity online.
Why is video marketing such a valuable tool for businesses?

Video is a method of engaging audiences with story-telling elements that are full of information which generates an emotional connection with an audience. Using video gives you an opportunity to display who you are online, and assist you with your branding.

Other benefits of video marketing fall into the category of driving greater conversions, and gaining a presence with online search engines.

According to comScore, the online video audience reaches 84.5% of the U.S. Internet audience and engagement levels are on a constant increase as its online presence becomes more and more prominent.

With this information at the forefront, it proves how important videos are and that they should be informative and entertaining at the same time. It is like having an online salesman working for you 24/7.

With so many benefits of using video marketing, here are a few other ways that you can also use it within the boundaries of your own walls to improve your own business:

Using video to be more visible in search engines.
Train new staff with a step-by-step video.
Make ‘explainer videos’ for your website.
Use video to present quick tutorials for clients.
Clients love to watch [...]

Marketing is the one thing that will directly affect the amount of recognition that a company gets and perhaps determines how lucrative it becomes. Having great marketing tactics can possibly be one of the most important parts of running a business.

For a business to succeed, it is imperative that customers come to recognize who you are and what you’re about. Using Facebook as a marketing tool can simply be one of these cost-effective applications that build brand awareness and make connections with customers.

Facebook is a proven method of advertising. And people like Facebook because it is engaging as they can share globally about the things that matter most to them. This is a platform that provides information and updates especially when it comes to marketing a business. Facebook has proven time and time again how useful it is for its billions of users. Look at these facts:

Posts are looked at most on work days, between 1 p.m. and 4 p.m.
Adding photos to your posts get more responses.
Ask your reader’s questions. They like to be included.
Share posts that are short and to the point.
Promote specials and events using hashtags.

When you get yourself out there and have brand recognition, people come to expect your posts on a regular basis. Some may even be surprised when they realize how much people rely on Facebook to hear about news, current events, or just finding something of interest to repost.

Facebook and marketing go hand in hand. It gives people a reason to become fans, a way to celebrate with you, and become part of your Facebook family. It’s all about engagement and finding ways to keep your fans turned-on and tuned-in.

Spread Your Content Far and Wide Through Content Syndication
Since the King (content) is back on the throne, we need to explore ways we can expand that kingdom! One solution that is quite effective but rarely brought up is content syndication. It is the practice of sharing your content at a number of places around the Web for mass consumption.

Some of the reasons why this is such a great tactic include that you can get a lot of traffic and backlinks for just a bit of effort. Mix in a bit of social promotion both from the sites you’re posting on and your own social channels, and you can easily have with a big win here!

5 Great ways to syndicate your content!

Paid content syndication sites – If you have a bit of a budget, (but not a lot!) content syndication sites like Outbrain and Taboola are great choices to help you get your content viewed on major websites like Time, The Washington Post and CNN, and a host of others. These are convenient to use, and accept smaller marketers.
Blogs within your industry – A free method that you can employ would be looking for blogs strongly related your market and offering your content to them. Many of these sites are too busy to keep pace with their own content needs and are actively seeking quality content.
Doc sharing sites – Document sharing sites like Slideshare, Scribd, DocStoc and a few others are terrific repositories for your content. They receive a ton of traffic, and rank well in Google. Moreover, you can accomplish this in minutes yourself, and the traffic and backlinks are there to have.
Submit to content aggregators – There are actually [...]

Measure the effectiveness of your social media efforts
Everyone understands that social media can be a total time suck if not managed properly, and the last thing you need is yet another drain on your time and resources. So when you are analyzing the effectiveness of your social media marketing how do you discover what’s working and what’s not?

This is far more than simply looking at the numbers of Likes and pages shares you’re getting. We’re referring to how effective your social media is at bringing you the results you want. Let’s examine a handful of ways to get this done.

5 Ways to measure social media effectiveness

Use tools to keep track of your social media presence – Fortunately for us there are plenty of great tools available, some free and most paid (but not very expensive) that can help you measure your social media effectiveness. Some of these are tools like SproutSocial.com, Hootsuite.com, and SocialMention.com. Not only that, each of the big social media platforms also provide some tools to help you, and there’s also always Google Analytics.
Quantify engagement – Simply because they’re there doesn’t mean they’re doing anything, or being influenced by your content. Looking at the actions taken by particular visitors can help you understand the ROI of that particular, post, platform or campaign.
Look closely at your click thru rate – By tracking the click-thrus you are able to tell which of your campaigns are getting to your desired actions, whatever that may be, and whether they should be tweaked or changed in some way.
Compare referrers – Each source of social traffic is going to be different, and as such you should evaluate each of them with an eye [...]

Over-optimization – Something you need to be concerned about?
One of the recent updates Google endowed us with over the last few years included what became called the over-optimization penalty. This one is basically aimed at Webmasters who try and stuff their pages with keywords in the hopes of raising them in the search engine results.

This played out with folks being told to create their pages using a keyword density of between 2.5 and 5 percent for their primary keyword. The problem was, at least for many of us using WordPress and similar blogging platforms as our content management system, we now know that:

WordPress isn’t quite as “SEO ready” as we first thought!

It turns out that WordPress just loves to stuff your blog template with your primary keyword. Just by using many of the default and popular widgets you may have dozens of mentions of your keyword before you’ve even written it once! When you count up the times it appears in elements like titles, tags, categories, author links, archives and more, you’ll be amazed at how many times you’re using them. Google looks at the entire page of code, not just the article or blog post when determining how to rank your content!

So how do you avoid this?

Never fear, we’ve found some great tips to avoid over-optimization in WordPress.

Stop using tags – The use of tags and tag clouds grossly inflates the number of times your keyword is found on the page. Entirely not needed!
Take out the author link from your template – This produces another exact duplicate version of your post, which is duplicate content defined! Google how to do this.
Don’t use breadcrumb navigation – More keywords that aren’t serving [...]

Best Backlink Practices for 2014
While many in the post-Penguin Google world would have you assume that link building as a way of helping you rank better in the search engines is dead, we beg to differ.

Not so fast, as stated by Google’s own Liege of link building Matt Cutts states: “Links are still the best way that we’ve found to discover (how relevant or important somebody is) and maybe, over time, social or authorship or other types of markup will give us a lot more information about that.”

Now that we have that clarified, let’s have a look at some of the best practices for link building in 2014 and most likely beyond.

Internal linking on your site – Internal linking means the links you have on your own pages that (hopefully) lad to more relevant content on your site. Google views this as a help to your visitors, and as long as you don’t overuse the linkage with tons of excess keyword links, such as extra menus and tag clouds and the like, you’ll have some love too. Link from textual content to other textual content, and use anchor text that makes sense.

Google+ shares – It may not be Facebook yet, but Google+ can get your pages indexed rapidly, and this definitely benefits you in your search rankings.

Think about guest blogging – Long used as a good way to get links and traffic to your pages, think also about being the site that welcomes and promotes guest posts. This can be a boon to your own site authority, content and links.

Curate popular content on your own site – From time to time we find a post or bit of content that has gone viral [...]

Knowing the sources and origins of your site’s online business is an critical piece for competing in today’s demanding online landscape. Analytics programs will help in showing us the roadmap customers and prospects took to find us, and also the actions they made once there.

If you haven’t yet started using any sort of analytics programs on your web sites, there’s no time like now! Start out with the free version of Google Analytics until you find you require more, and start collecting data.

Once you’ve got this rolling in, what to do with it? Here are 5 suggestions for using your analytics data in 2014.

5 Tips for analytics in your small business

Choose the performance indicators you need – While there are numerous things you’ll be able to track, it can be overwhelming to bite off a big chunk when just beginning. First pay attention to indicators that all of us have to know, like site traffic, conversions, referrals and time on page.
Understand what your Analytics are telling you – This is often a lot to digest at first. There are a lot of terms and acronyms you might not recognize, so take a moment to understand what you’re looking at. The data will start to be more understandable if you do.
Set up an automated email report – Many of us will either be too busy or forget to login in regularly to look at the data. Address this by setting up a regular email that sends to the data in a PDF format, so you can act upon it!
You can track more than your site – There are few web properties that can’t accept the JavaScript code required to track for your [...]

You’ve always intended to get a video marketing strategy started, nevertheless for whatever reason it just hasn’t gotten off the ground. Let’s end any confusion and delay due to lack of know-how about what to do right here and now.

Creating an effective video marketing strategy takes some thought and care. It’s not merely a matter of slapping up the latest company picnic video shot from your smartphone onto YouTube and expecting this to do miracles for you.

Today’s successes in the video marketing arena are there because they had a plan, and they executed it. Let’s figure out how you can do that with your business!

5 Methods for building a killer video marketing strategy!

Use video testimonials – Consumers are a lot more likely to be impressed with your goods and services if it is eminating from the mouth of a live customer on video. This is much more effective as social proof than any textual version could be. Not only that, the person doing the testimonial benefits at the same time, especially if they are also a business person.
Helpouts are not just for Google! – If you want raving fans, create a series of helpful, how-to videos offering advice and help on topics your audience is interested in. These are terrific sales tools, even when you don’t actually offer anything for sale in them. Using these types of videos to teach and answer general questions will win their loyalty.
Make better product videos – It’s fine to showcase your products, but work to make them more than just a slick presentation followed by a call to action. Why not take this opportunity to show how your product benefits the end user, ideally in a [...]

If you’ve been internet marketing for any length of time no doubt you’ve heard the oft-repeated proverb that Content is King. Well, as it turns out, it’s finally right.

Content marketing is without question the hottest buzzword going into 2014, and for good reason. Some 27 million pieces of content are shared daily. And with Google’s search algorithm getting smarter, and by that I mean being able to properly discern a piece of content’s actual popularity via social signals among other things, it’s harder and harder to foist unmerited content upon the search results.

So how do you make that magic on your own sites? Here are some trends and best practices for content marketing in 2014.

Make a content plan – Just like major publishers use an editorial calendar, you need to make and stick to a content plan, one that’s flexible enough to allow for spontaneous adjustments when needed.
Make a blog – Since each month more than 329 million people read blogs, and businesses that have an active blog are receiving 97 percent more leads than those who don’t have one, what’s your excuse now?
The advent of branded content – Another newish term lately is branded content. This is content designed to sell while at the same time providing an undeniable entertainment value.
New channels – Exploring new content channels you may not have tried before ought to be on your to-do list. LinkedIn sponsored posts, Slideshare and Google+ are awesome outlets to plunder.
SEO your content – Organising your content with SEO in mind is critical. Social sharing, links and tying in with email are items to keep in mind. It never hurts to have Google in mind when building your content.

We all know that it’s easier to sell to existing customers than it is to find lots of new ones, so it only makes sense to ensure we are doing the very best job possible optimizing the sales funnel for conversions. This will help not only boost sales form existing traffic, but from any new visitors as well!

In 2014 it should be a goal to not only increase traffic to our sites, but also to do a better job of converting those that do make an appearance. I’d go for a 1 percent rise in conversion over a 1 percent increase in traffic any day!

5 Tips on how to win with conversion rate optimization

One page serves one purpose – Having a single, clear purpose for each page will serve to make not just your conversions better, but also your search engine rankings. Don’t clutter your pages with extraneous links, and banners that detract from the main goal of the page.
Optimize all of your funnel – Conversion rate optimization extends to any content or page that is a part of your marketing message. This means your emails, landing and squeeze pages, social media pages and more. Everything needs to be working in concert to send a clear, unified sales message.
Check your site speed – A slow loading page is the biggest reason people will leave your site. Additionally, it can contribute (negatively) to your search engine rankings, as a high bounce rate is included in the Google search algorithm. If you want help determining where your problems lie in this area, try YSlow.
Content and conversions go hand in hand! – Seems like everybody is looking at a content initiative this year, and [...]